From a door at the back of the stage, I found myself in a narrow corridor, lit by a single red bulb. The first door I tried opened onto a small room where six men were seated round a table, in the centre of which lay a pile of stray bills and small change. Smoke hung in the air, the pungent whiff of marijuana. Everyone was holding cards and the chatter was loud and raucous.
‘So what you been doin’ hanging round Mrs Colbie’s place, Henry? cause you sure ain’t been teachin’ her how to play poker.’
‘I’ve been pokin’ somethin’, sure ’nuff, ain’t quite figured out what, that’s all. I just keep pokin’, hopin’ for the best.’
‘You’ve got a dirty mouth, Henry. Mrs Colbie’s a good church-going widow.’
‘Well, it ain’t the Lord been puttin’ a smile on her face. I’ll tell you what, these niggers around Scarsdale, they been lyin’ to me all these years when they say white women can’t fuck.’
When the laughter petered out, one of the men noted my presence. ‘You got bidness?’ he asked.
‘I’m with SinnerMan,’ I said.
He sniffed, apparently satisfied. ‘Out back,’ he said, tipping his head towards another door, next to which Hard Head was stretched on a couch, fast asleep. I walked carefully past him, measuring my steps so I didn’t stumble.
Everything froze as I entered. SinnerMan and Uncle Jimmy were standing over the hold-all, counting out bags of coke and weed. Evildoer and Assassin were slumped on a sofa, mouths agape, looking at me like I had materialised in a puff of smoke. The bricks of money on the table put the poker game next door to shame. Behind them all stood another man, smartly turned out in a dark suit. His face was so wide, hard and stony, he looked like he might have been the original model for the Easter Island statues. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, knowing I probably wasn’t supposed to be seeing this.
‘Who’s this motherfucker?’ asked Stoneface.
‘He’s cool,’ SinnerMan reassured him, shooting a dirty look at Assassin and Evildoer, who were half-heartedly attempting to escape the sofa’s gravitational pull.
‘I’m cool,’ I vouched for myself.
Stoneface didn’t seem convinced. ‘Miles Davis is cool, motherfucker. Who the fuck are you?’
‘Why’nt’cha all relax, now, my very, very good friends,’ said Uncle Jimmy. ‘This here’s my nephew’s ride, ain’t that right?’
‘I know you,’ said Stoneface.
‘I get that a lot,’ I said.
‘You’re that fuckin’ pop star. Zippo. My daughter plays your records. What the fuck you doin’ here?’
‘It’s a long story,’ I shrugged, uneasily.
‘You really a pop star?’ said Uncle Jimmy. ‘That’s nice.’
‘Is this s’posed to be some kinda fuckin’ joke?’ snarled Stoneface. ‘Candid fuckin’ camera?’
‘You famous?’ asked Uncle Jimmy. ‘I don’t really keep up with the records these days.’
‘What kind of fool brings a fuckin’ pop star to a meet. You got a yearning to be on TV?’ said Stoneface. ‘Maybe America’s Most Stupid?’
‘Don’t be callin’ me no fool, nigga,’ snarled SinnerMan, looking a little sheepish.
‘Take care of your friend,’ said Stoneface. ‘We got business.’
‘I’m’a take care of this one,’ said a voice, soft and close to my ear. I twisted to see Karnivor, who had come in silently behind me.
‘Where the fuck you been, bro? You supposed to be on the door. Shit!’ said SinnerMan.
‘Hadda take a piss,’ said Karnivor.
‘Why’n’t you just piss on the door, like you do at home,’ sniggered Assassin.
‘Shut your mouth, halfpint, or I’m’a piss all over you,’ sneered Karnivor.
‘Jesus Christ, I’m not interested in whatever shit is going down here,’ I interjected, maybe too forcefully. Even in my pathetic state, I was acutely aware of how finely balanced the tension in the room was. ‘I’m sorry to intrude. I’m just going to leave you to it, OK?’
‘You can’t be leavin’ already,’ complained Uncle Jimmy. ‘You gotta say hello to old Honeyboy. He be very pleased to meet a fellow musicianeer.’
‘Honeyboy?’ Who the fuck was Honeyboy?
‘Clarence Urreal Burnside,’ announced Uncle Jimmy proudly. ‘Greatest bluesman you never heard with your very own ears. He been playing this juke since before I was born, and that was a long time ago, let me tell you. Peoples call him Honeyboy but I can’t rightly say why. He ain’t sweet iffen he ever was and he sure as hell ain’t a boy no more. Names stick, I guess.’
‘Are we fuckin’ done with the history lesson?’ growled Stoneface.
‘You sit tight, cuz,’ SinnerMan instructed me. ‘Drink some more of Uncle Jimmy’s juice. I’m’a take care of business here, then we pay our respects to the man. Evil, take our boy outside, buy him a drink.’
‘I don’t want another drink,’ I said. Ever, I might have added. ‘But I could use some of that.’ I pointed to the bags of powder on the table.
‘That’s how it’s goin’ down, is it?’ said Stoneface.
SinnerMan looked at me like I was a stone idiot. I felt craven and ashamed but I desperately needed something to straighten my head. Or at least that’s what I was telling myself. He pulled a little baggie from inside his jacket and poured the contents on the table. ‘What you waitin’ for?’
‘Uhm … you got a dollar bill?’
‘Shit, you s’posed to be a rich motherfucker,’ muttered Karnivor. ‘Now we payin’ this bitch to bump our coke?’
SinnerMan peeled a fifty off one of the stacks. I didn’t look anybody in the eye as I rolled it up and did what I had to. Not that it made much difference. I was still ripped to my tits, I just didn’t feel the desperate need to crawl away somewhere and sleep any more. I let Evildoer escort me out.
‘Hey, Zippo!’ called Stoneface. I turned back. ‘Don’t be runnin’ off nowhere.’
‘Well, I, for one, am glad my nephew is consorting with a better class of people,’ smiled Uncle Jimmy.
I needed air, so Evildoer led me down the corridor and out back, all the while asking questions about how much you get paid for making a track, who collects your royalties and whether it was worthwhile having management. ‘My rap is fresh,’ he assured me. ‘I’m ready to blow up. You wanna hear?’
‘Not right now,’ I politely requested. But he went right ahead anyway, peppering the warm night air with sloppy verses about capping niggas and banging hos, hands chopping like he was engaged in a karate fight with an invisible assailant. I looked up at the almost full moon, wrapped in a radiant halo, glowing like a promise above dark, ancient trees. The aroma of the forest filled my nostrils, damp and mossy and green, the smell of my own faraway homeland.
‘Something’s wrong with you, baby, you got an evil stranger in your midst,’ said a voice out of the darkness. Evildoer nearly jumped out of his baggy pants. Gun in hand, he whipped around in alarm.
Alberta was sitting on a fold-up chair, pale and still in the moonlight. She had removed her scarf and an electroshock of grey hair sprang wild and wiry from her head. Her magnified eyes seemed independent of her, moving about in the spectacles like bloodshot globes. When she smiled at me, her teeth, what were left of them, were crooked and furred. I could tell by the way Evildoer was recoiling that he was intimidated by the old crone. But whatever was inside her, straining against the shell of age and infirmity, had cast a spell over me. I moved forward to sit at her feet.
‘Where did you learn to sing like that, Alberta?’ I asked.
‘Life is all the teacher you need,’ she said. ‘Never had no education. I was born a triplet, seven brothers and sisters before me. When Daddy seen what Mama brought into the world, he was not a happy man, cause he had too many mouths and too little food to put in ’em. You had to live very scarcely back then, you know, just bread and meat. They was hard times. So he said to my mother, “Come and pick the one you want, cause I’m gonna drown the other two
.” Course, Mama, she couldn’t choose between her three little babies, so Daddy says, “Whichever one of these fellers bawls the loudest, that’s the one we gonna keep.” And I been bawlin’ ever since.’
I saw Evildoer cross himself as he backed into the house. I don’t think I had ever heard a story so terrible, yet the old woman told it like she was passing the time of day. ‘I been near to death all my life and it ain’t got hold of me yet,’ Alberta continued. ‘Mama passed when I was six years old. That’s just about the earliest thing I can remember. Daddy put her in her grave. Said she’d been messing round with Holt Watson, fella on the sharecrop next but one. I don’t know nothing about that. All my brothers and sisters were running around, crying and begging. I remember that. “Please, Daddy, don’t kill Mama, Daddy please.” He never was one for listening to us children. Killed old Holt Watson too, they say. Burned the house right down, them inside it. That’s when I caught the blues. It’s a feeling deep inside, so deep you can’t possibly get to the bottom of it. You know.’
Oh, I knew. I sat hugging my knees, listening as Alberta talked about her life, so much trouble and pain, ‘hard lived and easy told’, she said. Her daddy had been on the chain gangs, but he turned up every few years to bring fresh misery into her existence. The community dated back to the civil war. ‘Coloured time, the slavery,’ as she called it. Virginia sided with the Confederacy, West Virginia stuck with the Union, and escaped slaves settled in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains. ‘Grandma was born the second year of surrender.’ Life was hard up here for the white folks, even harder for the blacks, but at least there were no lynchings, mostly people were too tired working to bother with hating. Alberta worked in the fields and she worked in the railroad, she worked as a cook on the coal mines and a dishwasher in the sawmills. ‘I have done just about everything a person could name to make that money for living.’ Then her daddy got out of jail the last time and took her to sing with him in juke joints. ‘He could raise a big mess but the people did love to hear him holler.’ She fell pregnant, even though she said she ‘never knew no man but Daddy’. Alberta gave birth to twins but her father sold them to a childless couple in Chicago, at least that’s what he told her. Some nights she dreamed of her babies fighting their way out of a sack in the river and woke up so wet with tears she thought she was drowning herself. ‘I prayed they growed up big and strong and never had to sing the blues. You know.’
And even though the world she described was a million miles from my own, that part I did understand. ‘No man nor woman in good spirit and pure heart can sing the blues,’ said Alberta. Her disembodied eyes shone with tears. ‘Never has been, never will be.’ And she started to sing, softly.
You can fill your eyes with silver, fill your belly full of gold
You can buy an ocean liner, sail it all around the world
You can climb a ivory tower, you can fall down on yo’ knees
But when Mama Death come calling, you come crawling back to me
Soft hand claps sounded as SinnerMan and Uncle Jimmy emerged from the shadows. ‘You putting the fear of God in the boy with your stories, Alberta?’ called Uncle Jimmy, grabbing me around the shoulders. ‘Alberta and the truth are very distant relations.’
‘What would you know about that, Jimmy?’ sniffed Alberta. ‘I’m proud of my life, cause I come through with my skin on. And if I had to live over, I’d live it all over again.’
‘We’re gonna borrow your young man, sister, I hope you don’t mind,’ smiled Jimmy. ‘He’s gonna pay his respects to Honeyboy. This fella here is a noted musicianeer hisself, ain’t that right, Zip?’
‘You take care now, child,’ said Alberta. ‘There’s two sides to the road, no needs to walk on the wrong one.’
‘You know Honeyboy, Alberta?’ I asked. She looked up at the moon but didn’t answer.
‘Everybody knows Honeyboy,’ insisted Uncle Jimmy, evasively.
‘He’s my daddy,’ said Alberta.
Clarence Urreal ‘Honeyboy’ Blindside was laid out like a corpse in a room at the furthest extension of the building’s random sprawl. He was tricked up in a sharp black country-and-western suit with elaborate silver woven patterns, white shirt buttoned to the neck and a bootlace tie with native American clasp, lying dead still on a double bed with a black mahogany headboard carved in the form of an eagle. Sharp screws protruded hazardously from the bedposts. Roaches skittered up the panelling on the wall behind. He was a big man, wide and thick-set, though the skin of his broad face had loosened with age and hung in saggy folds. His eyes were closed. Two women sat either side, like mourners keeping watch. They glanced up anxiously as we entered, as if our presence might disturb the spirits.
Uncle Jim coughed hesitantly. ‘Uh-hum … is he awake?’
‘I am the Black Ace, I am the boss card in your hand,’ the corpse announced in a bullfrog croak. The women stared at us balefully.
‘Brought someone to meet you, Honeyboy. He is a noted musicianeer and popular star.’
‘That so?’ croaked the corpse. And he opened his eyes. One was watery grey and bloodshot, swimming in yellow and flecked with black spots, which was nonetheless an improvement on the other, bleached white and blind. He lay there examining me intently with his functioning eye for a while. Then he sniffed, loudly and dismissively. ‘I got but one eye and part of my lung is gone, but my fingers is still live. I been shot, I been cut, but nobody can take me down. Some niggers say I can’t fight as good as I used to but if Honeyboy gets his hands on him, he belongs to me. I’m the wolf, baby, take my time prowlin’, wipe my tracks with my tail.’
Uncle Jimmy smiled benignly, as if all this made sense.
‘Help me up now, dear ladies, I got to keep moving, got to keep moving, blues fallin’ down like hail,’ Honeyboy commanded.
It was quite some operation for the women just to get him into a sitting position, feet on the floor, through which he grunted and cursed under his breath. As he moved, his trouser legs shifted, revealing white scar tissue around his ankles. The women said nothing, as silent as the devil’s hand maidens. They had the look of sisters, middle-aged with a sad-eyed beauty. He patted one on the ass, letting his hand linger. ‘Whoa, it smoke like lightnin’, yeah, but shine like gold,’ he croaked. ‘Don’t you hear me talking, pretty baby?’ The ancient figure seemed to be propelled by a kind of malevolent vitality. ‘Who sent you down here, boy, what did you break in this jail for?’ he enquired. I wasn’t sure if he was addressing me or just reciting half-remembered lyrics. Beckoning me closer, he gripped my arms tightly with big, bony hands. ‘You look like a man who would kill your mother. Oh boy, what did you kill that old woman for?’ Then he laughed, a sound like torn sandpaper.
‘Where did you get those scars?’ I asked. Just for something to say. The women gasped as if I had blasphemed in front of the pope but Honeyboy seemed unperturbed.
‘Well, I can’t rightly remember if that was the state farm in Mississippi or the chain gang in Wisconsin, what would you say, Jimmy? Black nigger baby gonna take care of myself, always carry a great big razor and a pistol in my vest. Turn that nigger round and knock him on the head, cause white folks say, “We’re gonna kill that nigger dead.” Uh huh. Take a drink with me, boy.’
Jimmy fished a couple of tin cups through a pot of liquid. A visible shudder passed through Honeyboy’s body as he sank his but it was hard to tell if it was pleasure or pain. I held the cup in my hand uncertainly but when he turned that one gruesome eye on me I poured the burning fuel down my throat. Honeyboy’s rank breath hit me like a heatwave. The musical vibration of the house thudded in my ears. I stared into the tiny black iris of his one good eye and saw it bloom like an ink blot, sucking me in with the gravitational pull of a black hole. ‘I’m a crawlin’ king snake and I rule my den,’ Honeyboy croaked, his laughter echoing around my skull. ‘Oh, I’m blue, black and evil and I did not make myself!’
‘Play Honeyboy one of your popular songs,’ Uncle Jimmy urged, h
anding me a hollow-body Gibson semi-acoustic guitar, scratched and worn but with beautiful pearl inlays and elegant f-holes. I tried to make excuses. The guitar is not really my chosen instrument. I can make my way around it if I have to but it helps if I am sober.
‘You ain’t one of them crack-smokin’ jive-talking rappers, is you, little boy?’ Honeyboy growled suspiciously, as I fumbled with some chords. ‘In this latter day here, with all this education, in this here space age, when everybody’s lookin’ up, the whole world turning back to front, you got the white children trying to be negroes, and the negroes trying to be white, and everybody wants blood but nobody wants to spill it. Keep it real, Urreal, young niggers tell me, but blues is reality and I am the blues, that’s right. They ain’t seen the things I seen, trouble, trouble, trouble all over the world.’ Spittle was dribbling from his mouth, he seemed to be chewing himself into a state of vitriol. ‘If you was white, should be all right, if you was brown, stick around, but as you is black, git back, git back, git back. What is so damn wonderful about reality?’
I started to sing ‘Make It On My Own’ in a shaky voice. It’s got a lot of chords and I was showing off, though they weren’t falling under my fingers right and the Gibson was thin and dull without amplification. The chorus soars through the octaves, technically it’s quite hard to sing and probably not the wisest selection on a tin cup of 100-per-cent-proof bootleg whiskey but I stood up and belted it out.
Baby there is something you should know
I want you to stay, I don’t want you to go
But if you should leave me,
You better believe me, baby
I can make it on my own.
SinnerMan applauded loudly when I finished. ‘That’s my nigga,’ he announced. No one else responded. The women were waiting for Honeyboy’s lead while Uncle Jimmy seemed discomforted, as if I might have been trying to show Honeyboy up. The man himself just snorted indifferently.
‘How you gonna leave me, baby, with my pistol in your mouth?’ he croaked. He seemed so pleased with that, he repeated it a couple of times, chuckling, then stuck out one hand and wrapped it around the neck of the guitar. ‘One of these days, people, and it won’t be long, you gonna look for me baby and your daddy be gone,’ he announced. The women helped him to his feet. ‘The ice man’s calling, baby, I give it to you cold.’ One of the women placed a black cowboy hat on his head. ‘I can hear my black name ringin’, oh hurryin’ on down the line. I never been satisfied, and I just can’t keep from crying.’ He started to move off, embarking on a long, slow walk down the red-lit corridor, supported by the women.
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